Has Trump Considered Shutting the Eff Up?
America is sick of his shtick, but our babbler-in-chief can’t turn it off.
That pro-life rebellion against a lukewarm administration we wrote about earlier this week? Donald Trump seems to be tracking it, too. Today, Semafor reports, the White House is expecting to hold a “staff level pro-life focused meeting” with top activists—and recent critics—like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser in attendance. Should be an interesting meeting! Happy Friday.
Catherine Rampell and JVL are going live on Substack and YouTube at 12:30 p.m. EDT for an economic update on this “golden age” we’re in.
One Speed Only
by Andrew Egger
Something weird’s been happening lately. Donald Trump will be doing some unremarkable event surrounded with cheerful citizens, sometimes children. He makes small talk, banters with them, as one does. Only the small talk often turns out to be insane MAGA gobbledygook, like an in-person reenactment of Trump’s latest Truth Social rant.
Just this week, Trump staged an Oval Office event announcing his revival of the Presidential Physical Fitness Award, the annual grade-school fitness contest. “Barack Hussein Obama—have you heard of him?” the president groused to the kids around him. “The Obama administration phased out this wonderful tradition. Thank you, Barack, very much. Great job.” When one boy told him he was planning to try powerlifting, Trump immediately began yammering about the unfairness of biological males participating in women’s powerlifting—before suggesting he didn’t think this kid (who looked all of 13) would stoop to such tactics: “I don’t think we have to worry about you.”
Or consider last month, when Trump used an even more implausible event—the White House Easter Egg Roll—to share some of his favorite conspiracy theories about Joe Biden. “He was incapable of signing his name, so they’d follow him around with a big machine,” Trump told a table of coloring children. “Do you know what it was called? An autopen. He’d have the autopen sign for him. . . . That’s not too good, right?”
Or how about his tax-week stunt with DoorDash? Trump’s choreographed “delivery” last month of McDonald’s to the White House was supposed to be a straightforward victory lap on his affordability accomplishments for service workers. Instead, Trump peppered “DoorDash Grandma” Sharon Simmons with questions about whether she’d voted for him and whether men should play in women’s sports. “I really don’t have an opinion on that,” Simmons demurred. “I’m here about no tax on tips.”
Now Andrew, you might say, this is not new. And you’d be right, to a point: Trump has a longstanding habit of injecting his particular manias into even the most incongruous proceedings: During last year’s Thanksgiving Turkey Pardoning, Trump joked that “some of my more enthusiastic staffers” had been drafting paperwork to ship the turkeys “straight to the terrorist confinement center in El Salvador.” Already during Trump’s first term, it was a running joke that he could never hold himself in the register of respectability for long—and that it was some monumental accomplishment when he could make it the length of a full speech without major incident (“today is the day Trump truly became president”).
But what we see now is different. It isn’t just that Trump can’t keep his id under control for long stretches of time. These days, it seems, he can’t sublimate it at all.
We could spend productive hours speculating about why this is—the weakening impulse control of advanced age, the brain-puddinging effect of being surrounded at all times by bowing, scraping yes-men. Or maybe it’s just the same solipsism and monomania Trump’s been carrying around in his skull all along: He is so incapable of imagining the world as others see it that he actually thinks kids want to yuk it up with him about trans sports and autopens.
Whatever the psychological explanation, Trump’s growing inability to turn off The Trump Show™, even in short bursts, couldn’t be coming at a worse time for him politically. As a person, as a leader, as the head of a political project, Trump has rarely been less popular: Nate Silver’s polling aggregator puts him at just 39 percent approving, with 57.6 percent disagreeing.
Presidents are not without tools to try to fight against headwinds like these. That’s the whole point of all these smaller events: To try to show different (less odious?) sides of the president’s personality, or at least to remind voters of specific things they’ve liked that he’s done.
But successfully pulling off a strategy like this would require Trump to exercise a little self-discipline—to recede into the background, to keep a hold on his tongue, to let his strategists take the lead for a change. It would require him to admit to himself that his stream-of-consciousness shtick—his secret sauce, his essential himness that has kept him in the driver’s seat of American politics for a decade—might not be what this moment calls for.
It is, in a word, impossible. Trump always deeply resents being told what he can and can’t say. Even now, even when it is obviously and enormously in his interest to do so, he either can’t or won’t clam up—which, for a man as enslaved by his own vices as Trump is, has always amounted to the same thing.
America, to its increasing distaste, has the sort of president who spends his days nattering insanely to children about the elections that have been stolen from him and the suspiciously ethnic middle names of his predecessors. And the president seems determined not to let them forget it.
Post Imperium Americanum
by Joe Perticone
A little more than one year ago, I was walking along the Tiber River in Rome when my phone buzzed with a push alert announcing the death of Pope Francis. A week later, Vatican City swelled with Catholic pilgrims, dignitaries, and tourists for his funeral, which added another layer of logistical stress to my wedding the same day at the nearby Basilica di San Silvestro in Capite.
Then, exactly one year ago today, the conclave reached their decision: Chicago-born Robert Prevost would become the next leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics. Since then, Pope Leo XIV’s papacy has created a surge in Catholic enthusiasm and engagement in the United States and elsewhere. Baptisms are skyrocketing in the United States. Anecdotally, I’ve never seen Masses more packed than they are now every Sunday. If you arrive five minutes late, it’s standing room only.
Leo has also been unapologetically critical of U.S. foreign and domestic policies, which have been violent and erratic during Donald Trump’s second term in office. Trump has routinely responded with lies about the pope’s personal views, while others in his administration have butted heads with the Church and its leadership. On Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ventured to the Vatican to meet with the pope. Afterward, the Holy See issued a statement emphasizing the “need to work tirelessly in favor of peace.”
It’s important to not view Leo’s papacy as a response to American authoritarianism, even if he often finds himself responding to the Trump administration’s statements and behavior. That the conclave elected a U.S.-born cardinal actually speaks more to the United States’s irrelevance to Church matters. Shortly after Prevost became Pope Leo, Antonio De Loera-Brust recalled in the Jesuit America Magazine something a priest once told him: “Catholicism outlived the Roman Empire. We’ll outlive the American Empire, too.”
AROUND THE BULWARK
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: A technical glitch slowed down email delivery of last night’s Receipts, in which CATHERINE RAMPELL rings the bell for all the companies Trump has killed (other than his own). If you want to join the vigil for the once-great American economy, tune into Receipts Live at 12:30 p.m. eastern time.
Ukraine’s Secret Weapon: Adaptation… Nothing beats outthinking the enemy, reminds MARK HERTLING.
Could an 8-Year-Old Beat Up the President? On Bulwark+ Takes, SARAH LONGWELL and CATHERINE RAMPELL react to the absurd new YouGov poll asking whether Americans think they—or even an 8-year-old boy—could beat Donald Trump in a fight.
In Russia, a New Dissident Rises—But What’s His Game? CATHY YOUNG on why Ilya Remeslo is sus.
Summer Movie Preview! On The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, SCOTT MENDELSON joins SONNY BUNCH on the coming summer movies, $50 tickets, and ... ‘Infinity Vision’? Plus, SONNY reviews ‘The Sheep Detectives.’
Just announced! We’re thrilled to welcome these chatty friends to the stage for Bulwark Live: LA.
Join Tim, Sarah, and Sam for this one-night live show at The Novo on May 21. Grab your seats today.
Quick Hits
RE-UN-LIBERATED: When the Supreme Court struck down Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs this year, the president remained defiant: He’d just put the same tariffs back in place, he said, using different trade authorities. So far, however, that strategy’s not going so well, either. Yesterday, a panel of judges at the U.S. Court of International Trade struck down Trump’s replacement tariff regime as well, ruling that these tariffs also exceeded his authority under the statute he’d used to authorize them. The ruling even orders the administration to refund payments already made under these new tariffs.
Trump is, of course, expected to appeal. And he’s going back to the drawing board as well: “Nothing surprises me with the courts,” he told reporters last night. “Nothing surprises me, so we always do it a different way. We get one ruling, and we do it a different way.”
TRUMP’S WIND FATWA: America may be in a growing energy crunch, but Donald Trump will be damned if he’ll let a little thing like that stop his jihad against the wind industry. Despite losing in court many, many times in his attempts to unilaterally grind all new wind-power construction to a halt, climate publication Heatmap News reports, Trump is now reaching for his most far-reaching anti-wind strategy yet: smothering the industry by declaring basically all new turbine construction a threat to commercial flights on a case-by-case basis. Here’s Heatmap:
Since the early days of Trump 2.0, renewable energy industry insiders have been quietly skittish about a potential secret weapon: the Federal Aviation Administration. Any structure taller than 200 feet must be approved to not endanger commercial planes—that’s an FAA job. If the FAA decided to indefinitely seize up the so-called “no hazard” determinations process, legal and policy experts have told me it would potentially pose an existential risk to all future wind development.
Well, this is now the strategy Trump is apparently taking. Over the weekend, news broke that the Defense Department is refusing to sign off on things required to complete the FAA clearance process. . . . Over the past few weeks, according to ACP, this once-routine process has fully deteriorated and companies are operating with the understanding FAA approvals are on pause because the Department of Defense (or War, if you ask the administration) refuses to sign off on anything. The military is given the authority to weigh in and veto these decisions through a siting clearinghouse process established under federal statute. But the trade group told me this standstill includes projects where there are no obvious impacts to military operations, meaning there aren’t even any bases or defense-related structures nearby.
One energy industry lawyer who requested anonymity to speak candidly on the FAA problems told me, “This is the strategy for how you kill an industry while losing every case: just keep coming at the industry. Create an uninvestable climate and let the chips fall where they may.”
Cheap Shots
In Trump's defense, kids are incredibly difficult to talk to. You try to sit them down to have a meaningful conversation about how tariffs and a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz are driving up toy prices, and they just keep repeating, "But I want it."
It remains a persistent, baffling pathology of the American commentariat to constantly search for the phantom threads of strategy within a mind that has spent a lifetime proving its absolute vacancy.
Egger posits that Trump’s bizarre compulsion to interrogate a DoorDash driver about transgender sports, or to complain about Barack Obama’s middle name to grade-schoolers, suggests an "inability to turn off" his supposed strategic "shtick." This generous framing elevates an involuntary verbal hemorrhage into a tactical choice.
I think we need to stop asking why Trump refuses to exercise discipline or alter his political calculus, because doing so falsely implies he possesses the cognitive capacity to formulate a calculus in the first place. There is no hidden genius, no calculated "secret sauce," and certainly no internal monologue weighing the optics of ranting about autopens to children at an Easter Egg Roll. To ask if Trump considered the political ramifications of his behavior is to fundamentally misunderstand the subject. The answer to any question beginning with "Did Trump think of..." is always a resounding, categorical no. He simply is not capable.
I think we would be better off, if we all just admitted that reality.